Historical Perspective on the Development of Cerebral Localization, Cerebral Cortical Motor Stimulation, and Sensory Evoked Potentials

John Hughlings Jackson (Fig. 1), often called the “The Father of Neurology” was a keen-eyed observer with a passion for detail and brooding intelligence, which enabled him to see general laws emerging from details [1]. This remarkable British theorist by 1861 deduced motor activity to be the basic function of all nervous systems, proposed the anterior and posterior cerebrum being predominately motor and sensory respectively, and that motor and sensory brain centers represent sensorimotor movements not muscles. His thoughtful analysis based on the study of seizure patterns and neurological abnormalities demonstrated the somatotopic distribution of human motor and sensory functions across the human cerebral cortex [1, 2]. He further believed that higher levels of integration evolved to exert more extensive and progressively finer control … the cerebrum and cerebellum invariably work together … coordination being a function of the entire nervous system [1, 2].